Unless you've been living under a rock since Intel released its Core2 architecture upon enthusiasts, you'd know that AMD has had a less than stellar run afer acquiring ATI. AMD has been beaten at every level in recent times; from the lacklustre performance of its Phenom quad-cores on the desktop, a catastrophic Barcelona B2 revision for the Enterprise arena and a 45 nm architecture that is about to miss its initial launch target. Could it possibly get any worse?

Well according to Industry sources close to AMD it appears that there may be finally light at the end of the tunnel. According to these sources, AMD are currently well underway with a company restructure that looks set to place them in good stead against their blue rival.

On the corporate side, we are hearing chatter about internal restructuring currently taking place so that launches of processors correspond to launches of chipsets and graphics processors. While the launch of the Spider platform launch got buried under the TLB disaster, AMD thinks it now has a better understanding of the needs of individual markets...

On the product side, AMD wants to regain influence in the enthusiast market with affordable, but highly overclockable processors - such as the upcoming Phenom 9950. AMD is apparently shooting for a 12,000 CPU score in 3DMark Vantage. However, we were not able to get any specifics about the overclock required to hit this point. Since current Phenoms are checking in at less than 10,000 scores, we would expect a 20% higher clock rate.

Furthermore; AMD's 'balanced platform' approach in the continual advancement of GPU's seems to be paying dividends for the struggling company - something we are starting to see in AMD GPG's (formerly ATI Technologies) new series of cards.

AMD’s team in Austin managed to use two R700 dual-GPU graphic cards (four RV770 chips) to get a score of X12515. This was done with four GPUs, while Nvidia uses three GTX280 boards to achieve a similar score. The R700 boards were clocked at 778 MHz, while the GDDR5 memory was clocked at 980 MHz QDR (that's 3920 "MHz", or just 3.92 GigaTransfers/sec), we were told. This brought the total on-board video bandwidth to an impressive 250.8 GB/s.

Impressive indeed!

According to our source, R700 boards are planned for introduction within the next seven weeks and if rumours come true, then we should expect the Phenom 9950 in a similar timeframe. Arriving in time for an overclockable processor and GPU will be the overclocker-friendly 790GX chipset. The 790GX chipset will ship with two new Southbridge chips - the SB700 and SB750.

The future's certainly looking bright for AMD. It'll be nice to see some stiff competition from them in the very near future.